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So Stewart Jackson has been given a job in Government (again). Jackson is now on the lowest rung of the Governmental ladder, as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Brexit Minister David Davis. He had previously briefly reached the same position, as spear carrier to Owen Paterson, when he was at the Northern Ireland Office, in 2011.

Having recently discovered that I, along with many others apparently, have been blocked on twitter by Peterborough MP Jackson, I thought you would be interested to see a short history of his recent tweets.

Shortly after the Brexit vote, journalist (of the right) Rupert Myers, made a perfectly reasonable comment that the Brexit side had been untruthful on number of key points during the campaign, but now expected those who didn’t believe the lies, to be cheerful about the result.

Jackson replied

“suck it up whiner….”

this is fairly normal for Jackson who is known for his rudeness and generally priggish behaviour (I had the misfortune to meet him during my short stay with Buglife). Harry Potter author J K Rowling then retweeted Jackson’s abuse to her followers – 13,100 of whom retweeted it, I among them. For this, it would seem (for I had not sought to directly engage with Jackson on anything that I can recall) I was blocked.

One wonders whether he has a social media intern, day after day drudgingly working their way through all 13,000 twitter users and blocking them.

Jackson was clearly cock-a-hoop about the Brexit vote – he has been attacking the EU at least as long as he has been an MP, probably far longer. He started to lay into those who he felt were traitors to the cause, people like former Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, who had rather unenthusiastically campaigned for Remain. Jackson (a back bench MP) consigned Hammond to the political scrap heap on the Sunday after the Referendum, claiming that Cameron had tried to woo Boris to the remain side by offering him Hammond’s job at Foreign Affairs.

Given that Boris has indeed now got the Foreign Secretary role, albeit a shrivelled version, with international trade lopped off one side, and Brexit negotiations lopped off the other, might suggest Jackson had some sort of clairvoyant skills. Jackson could not possibly have predicted it would be Theresa May giving Boris that poisoned chalice though, nor that Hammond would be her right hand man at Number 11. That’s Politics!

Jackson also had May in his sights, a couple of days later. He had spotted a plot to install “remainer” Theresa May, by the old guard of the party, viz Lord Heseltine and Ken Clarke, plus John Major’s old flame Egwina Curry, and of all people, Blair’s enforcer Alistair Campbell. It’s a tinfoil hat conspiracy worthy of the most wild-eyed Corbynite. Clearly the May-Campbell brigade were going to ditch Brexit and we were all going to be living in Remainia.

For Jackson, May was another traitor – after Boris was stabbed by Gove, Jackson fell in behind Andrea Leadsom.

Leadsom was “excellent”, “principled” and with “real world experience”. Leadsom and Jackson are both members of the Fresh Start group of Tory MPs who would happily privatise their own grandmothers if they could. The “real world experience” Jackson had accrued before becoming an MP included working for Lloyds bank for ten years in the run up to the banking crash of 2007. Which means that Jackson was a bank manager in central London (and a small business manager)during the time when Lloyds was busy lending money to some people and businesses who had no chance of being able to pay it back. At the same time Lloyds were mis-selling payment protection insurance to people taking out mortgages – Lloyds had to set aside £3.6Bn to repay them once they (along wth other banks) had been found out. In the end it was the Labour Government which stepped in and acquired 41% of Lloyds group to save it from going bust. Jackson had already left by then. Of course it’s ridiculous to lay the blame on Jackson for the global financial crisis, but it does illustrate what his “real world” experience was, before becoming an MP.

Jackson was right behind Andrea Leadsom, as he had been part of the team, with fellow Brexiteer Liam Fox, who campaigned for David Davis as Tory Leader in 2005, when David Cameron surprised everyone and won. He tweeted from her launch event

On the same day, Jackson indicated where he sits on the political spectrum (not for the first time), retweeting a list of supposed Remain “lies” from a UKIP local council candidate, who peddled some untruths of his own in the run up to the Referendum eg this one on clean beaches and the EU.

After the shock announcement that Leadsom was pulling out of the race to be Tory leader, Jackson, seamlessly moved to back Theresa May, as if she was the one for him all along.

He then kept up the barrage of pro-May tweets…perhaps he was making a bid for the job of ambassador to Arslikhan.

And now has been appointed PPS to David Davis.

And if you want to read him in full flow then take a look at this from 2006, while Muslim members of his Peterborough constituency make their feelings about him pretty clear in this piece.

The issue of Immigration, whipped up as it has been, by people like Jackson, certainly played its part in the Referendum. But recent research indicates that areas with a significant proportion of non-British born people living in them overwhelmingly voted Remain (bear in mind EU nationals did not have a vote). It was the areas which had experienced the greatest increase in arrivals (since the EU enlargement in 2004) which voted for Brexit.

Yesterday Theresa May stated in Prime Minster’s Questions, that the Conservative Party wolud be busy over the next few months “bringing this country back together” after the Referendum (which her party had dreamt up, and instigated).

Perhaps she has decided that putting Stewart Jackson on the leash of being a Government employee (and therefore not able to speak out in the way he is accustomed to doing), is a good place to start.

Politics of politicians, you just couldn’t make it up? Soap opera or westminster farce ….

We seem to have moved failed bankers to powerful posts, why? Failed so we should trust them to do a better job with the public funds? Parliamentary expense scandal, we let them sort that amongst themselves – another instance that the poor taxpayers got what they deserved?

Sad that the ‘mainstream’ media fail to undertake thorough research on those given responsible posts? The public deserve a detailed and factual CVs of those who are in high public office.

Perhaps part of the problem with many of the general public is that they don’t have the time or inclination to discover the detail, so your factual based analysis from thorough research is invaluable Miles. Then again, perhaps the politicians prefer it that way as they twist and turn amidst the winds in Westminster?

Just as I would like to see vicarious liability introduced into England, how can we hold politicians to account for measurable failings, be they pecuniary (cost to public purse of rogue banking activity), be it signing off without parliamentary debate or cabinet approval on war, whatever it is? If there is not sufficient cost benefit analysis, demonstrable public benefit then those promoting and signing off on policies / actions should be accountable? Please don’t say through the ballot box, five years of rampant damage takes far longer to unravel?

Hopefully some ‘mainstream’ journalist will pick up the details you provide and make the information more widely available to the general public? Then again it sometimes seems that the media establishment are themselves part of the problem?

thanks Nimby. Sadly I think people have come to expect our politicians to be self-serving. The many that do excellent work on behalf of their constituents and the wider public good, are ignored by the media, who prefer salacious stories, made up or otherwise. Those that do take advantage are rarely if ever held accountable for their actions.

thanks – an interesting point I hadn’t picked up on, is that Jackson’s wife writes for the Express on immigration issues.

“O’Grady, the wife of Jackson, has written extensively about immigration as the Express’s social affairs correspondent. Her articles include: “How regions will be hit by soaring immigration”, “We’re sleepwalking to a migration nightmare”, “Immigration does cut house prices”, “White British now a minority in London” and “Pupils lose chosen schools to migrants”. O’Grady declined to comment to the Guardian.”

No problem with that view Miles, which also suggests you might perhaps agree that the mainstream media are in cahoots with ’em – in which case we have to use social media to our advantage and a critical mass of grass roots campaigning or challenge might cause those self serving individuals and their media mates a little concern perhaps.

Little wonder mainstream media is not as popular, is the daily newspaper a thing of the past? Given blatant bias with little regard for robust evidence or detailed fact should we mourn their continuing demise?

You have to chuckle at the thought of a muzzle on someone who appears to regularly shoot himself in the foot?

Without wishing to disappear down a tinfoil hat conspiracy rabbit-hole, there is certainly a highly influential group of (mainly men) people who regularly appear in the media, traditional, broadcast and social, to espouse their extreme neoliberal views, who also happen to have been heavily involved with running the Leave campaign, and whose friends are now influential politicians – within the Tory and UKIP parties. And given that it is the Mail online which is the most popular social media news site, I don’t necessarily see a shift from traditional paper newspapers, to online feeds, changing much in the way of the blatant bias.

Indeed, if the future is sites like The Canary, which calls itself a news website but reads more like a ranting blog with hard left views, pandering to the more extreme end of Corbynism, then it will be even harder to find robust evidence or nuanced, balanced sources of information.

The only bit I’d slightly disagree with you on is that his being appointed a PPS again is anything other than a promotion. A minor one and unpaid but still better than nothing. And they could easily have given him nothing (and probably should have
done).

Stewart has opted to use his privallaged position to lobby against re-ordering in a local church. He has described the process using inaccurate descriptions and inflamitary language. When challenged by members of the congregation his replies have been rude. We will naturally be abused, ignored and blocked. We get to vote on his performance in a few years time and his habit of alienating his constituents may come back to haunt him.